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The call ends.
“She’s such a trip.” Ren pockets his phone, then turns toward me. “Thanks for joining in on this. She was asking about you.”
My stomach does a somersault. “She was?”
“Oh, Linnie is low-key obsessed with you. She keeps asking when Trouble is coming to Sunday family dinner.”
I grin. “I’m not gonna lie, I love that she calls me Trouble.”
Ren laughs. “Ziggy cracks up every time she says it.”
My smile fades. I think about Ziggy, sitting around the table with her family, how good she probably is with her niece, if she’s half as good with her as she was with the kids at the roller rink fundraiser. Like Ren, she got down to their level with every one of them, saw them, engaged them, genuinely kind and attentive.
I think about how much I actually might like sitting at that table with Ziggy and all those noisy Bergmans, the same chaos that surrounded me at her game filling up a dining room.
“Thanks for keeping her going with the spells questions, by the way,” Ren says. “If she brought up puking again, I think I would have brought up my lunch.” Ren shudders. “I really can’t take puke. Talking about it. Thinking about it—”
“Zenzero!” Frankie hollers from down the hall, striding toward us like her badass self, cane tapping on the ground. She’s in a long black puffer jacket, her usual black and silver sneakers, black slacks, and a heather-gray V-neck sweater. Kings colors. “I’ve been looking for you.”
He grins, all heart-eyed at her. I forget what the nickname she used means, but it makes him a puddle of mush every time she does. “Hey, love button.”
“Don’t pull that cute crap on me right now, Carl Clayton for ESPN—the Carl Clayton just found me and said—Hey, Schar.” She nods to Kris who walks by us, doing a double take.
He straightens like a private who’s just encountered his commanding general, then smiles her way. Not all former staff just get to stroll around down here, but even if she weren’t married to Ren, the collective nostalgia for Frankie’s days here as their in-game social media coordinator, which predated her becoming an agent and my signing with the team, would be reason enough that she still mingles here from time to time.
“Frank the Tank. Good to see ya.” Kris offers Frankie an elbow. She taps his back with hers.
I glance between them, confused by the gesture.
“Cold and flu season,” Kris explains, nodding toward Ren. “Bergman here said if he saw any of us touch his wife’s hands with their grubby Petri dish paws between now and playoffs, he would not be responsible for his actions.”
Frankie and I turn toward Ren in tandem, wide-eyed. Ren blushes spectacularly as he scrubs at the back of his neck. “Brutal but necessary, Francesca. No more repeats of last season’s stomach bug.”
“Oh come on!” Frankie argues.
Kris takes signs of Frankie’s ire as the rightful cue to make himself scarce. I start to back off too, but Frankie grabs me by the jacket. “Not so fast, Gauthier. I want words with you.” She turns back to Ren. “I did not get that bug from the team.”
“Yeah, gumdrop, you definitely did. You came for burgers after we won, and slapped hands with Tyler, Arneaux, and Valnikov, all of whom started puking their brains out the next day.”
“Wow, you remember exactly who she slapped hands with?”
“One day, you will understand,” Ren tells me, then says to Frankie, “Puking their brains out, I tell you. Then, two days later, you were in the exact same predicament, vomiting left and right. I mean, you made spaghetti and meatballs and then, ten minutes later, tossed your cookies—well, your Italian, rather—so bad on the couch, we had to throw it out.” Ren gags. “Oof, went a little overboard there. I’m making myself nauseous.”
I rub my throat, coaxing down the knot set there by a wave of nausea. “Ya think?”
Now it’s Frankie’s turn to look a little green. “Ren, can we stop, uh…talking about…that?” She dabs her forehead, which is now damp with sweat.
Ren frowns, his gaze traveling her with concern. “Happily. I hate talking about puke.”
Hearing that word one last time seems to send her over, because suddenly Frankie grips Ren’s arm and promptly empties her stomach all over the floor.
After my mini emotional freak-out during Linnie’s call and the puke drama, I’m fucking euphoric to be out on the ice, my mind blank, my body weightless. This is the easiest place for me to exist. Just me and my skates, my stick and a puck and the goal to put it into, over and over. Sure, there are my teammates. There’s the fun of bringing together some really beautiful hockey with them. But nothing beats that feeling—in my skates, flying across the ice, the puck and my stick like an extension of me.
The air’s that perfect bracing cold as I play around with the puck, then take a slapshot on our goalie, Valnikov, that makes him yelp as he catches it with his glove right in front of his nuts. “Ease up, Gauthier. I’m trying to start a family!”
A few of the guys laugh as we weave around each other.
Ren skates toward me, looking a little pale but mostly himself. I skate up to him and stop on a small spray of ice. “You okay?”
